Finally I can talk about it openly.

I made Yvonne and Anghold calendars for Christmas. I finally got the gifts to them today. Anghold’s was called something to the effect of “Ang Hold’s Super-Fantastic Introduction to Dungeons and Dragons by Way of Toren’s Favourite 1st Edition Monsters 2004 Calendar“. It included staples like the beholder and the mind flayer, but also a couple personal faves like the thought eater and the grell. Both Yvonne and Anghold (independently) commented on the fact that the owlbear looked like a muppet (Sam the American Eagle>), and while Yvonne found most of the horrible monsters (like the umber hulk) “cute”, Ang found the purple worm legitimately scary. Heehee.

Yvonne got an altogether different calendar, called:

The 2-Tone Unsteady Players
presents
Best Loved Scenes From
12 AWKWARD MOMENTS IN HISTORY
a play directed by Cecil M. Frankenberry

So, if you can wrap your brain around this, it’s drawings & text of “awkward” instances in the history of the world, as if they were photos from a play on the subject. There was a cast of five actors, Floyd the Near-Sighted Skeleton, Snowgirl, Ewan O’Possum, Hello Cthulhu & the Clockwork Hippie>, plus the director, who, yes, is the Frankenberry from the cereal (he’s branching out from being a spokesdrawing for General Mills & getting into directing). I got a lot of help for ideas from Stewie, Mr. Tice, Rowan and many posts on various sites & forums, plus rummaging through books on hand. I think my favourite scene is the one in which Captain Oates (of Robert Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition) committed suicide simply by leaving the tent with the words “I am just going outside, and I may be some time.” Although my favourite drawing is the one where they dress up Hello Cthulhu as the Mars Orbiter that NASA lost* and swung him around the stage on a rope, holding a jiffy pop pan in one tiny hand and some cardboard “solar panels” in the other, while a smoke machine belches the “Martian atmosphere” onto the scene.

*because one team used metric and the other team used imperial.